Friday, September 26, 2008

1 He did jail time before he was even born.Tupac’s mother, Black Panther Afeni Shakur, was arrested in April 1969 for alleged conspiracy to bomb New York City police stations and landmarks. Temporarily out on bail in 1970, she became pregnant with Tupac but was forced to return to jail when several codefendants skipped town. At trial in May 1971, she successfully defended herself; she then gave birth to Tupac in June. “My embryo was in prison,” he later chuckled.

2 His first and middle name mean “shining serpent.”He was named Tupac Amaru, after a freedom-fighting eighteenth-century Incan chief whose body was torn apart by Spanish imperialists. Shakur means thankful to God in Arabic.

3 He was a playa early on.“I was effin white girls,” he recalled years later of his teen years at the Baltimore School for the Arts, a Fame-like performing arts high school.

4 He was an actor and ballet dancer before he was a rapper.After moving to Maryland with his mother and younger sister in 1984, Tupac was accepted into the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he majored in drama and studied dance. He began battle rhyming on the side, nicknaming himself MC New York.

5 He was very, very poor…Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, his schoolmate in Baltimore, remembers, “When I met Tupac, he owned two pairs of pants and two sweaters. He slept on a mattress with no sheets.”via